Many golfers struggle with striking the ball solidly and controlling the flight simply because they don’t hold the club correctly. When you get the golf grip wrong, your body will try to compensate and start a chain of errors that becomes incredibly hard to fix.
Here’s how to do it right:
1. Grip more toward the fingers with your gloved hand. You want the grip of the club to rest at the intersection of the palm and fingers in your gloved hand. Your pinkie, ring and middle fingers should be perpendicular to the grip as they wrap around it, not angled across it.
2. The heel pad (not the thumb pad) of your gloved hand should rest on top of the grip. Then cover your gloved hand’s thumb with the lifeline of your bare hand. It should fit snugly as though you were holding a hammer.
3. While still holding the club vertically as shown, you should see two to three knuckles on your gloved hand. And, if you were to open the fingers of your bare hand, the palm should be on the back of the grip.
4. Make minor adjustments as needed during practice. You can fine-tune your ballflight by slightly altering one or both of your hands. Simply turn either or both to the right (clockwise) on the grip to send the ball more to the left or counterclockwise (to the left) to make the ball go more to the right.
John Dunigan is the director of instruction at White Manor CC in Malvern, Pa.
